How To Redirect Water Runoff To The Garden

Learn here how to use rain water harvesting to water your garden. Think beyond the rain barrel and figure out how to redirect water runoff. Harvest more water for your garden!

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by AdobeStock/Li Ding

Learn here how to use rain water harvesting to water your garden. Think beyond the rain barrel and figure out how to redirect water runoff. Harvest more water for your garden!

Harvesting rainwater to use for growing vegetables makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, the most common method of rainwater harvesting isn’t the most effective. Typically, gardeners invest in a rain barrel — which holds only 50 or 60 gallons of water — and then dole out the captured water to plants as needed, hopefully emptying the barrel before the next storm.

But 50 gallons is only a small fraction of the water you could be harvesting each time it rains. During a 1-inch shower, more than 900 gallons of water flow off the roof of a 30-by-50-foot house or barn. Instead of catching just a little bit of it in a rain barrel, why not capture it all? You can do just that with a simple setup that diverts rain from your downspouts directly to your garden. We’ll tell you more about how to do this in a minute, but first, we’ll explain why we think it’s such a good idea.

How Soil Stores Water

Even many experienced gardeners have trouble comprehending just how much water soil can hold. Except in areas with consistently high rainfall, your garden soil’s moisture level will seldom be at “field capacity.” That’s the term scientists use to describe the maximum amount of water a soil can hold. When it rains or when we irrigate, gravity pulls the water down into the soil. After a heavy rain, some of the water may move all the way down to the water table or the bedrock, but a large amount of it is held by capillary forces that cause water to coat each soil particle and partially fill the spaces between particles. (An example of capillary action is the way a paper towel absorbs liquid.) That capillary water is what your crops use as they grow.

  • Updated on Feb 20, 2023
  • Originally Published on Jul 9, 2012
Tagged with: rain barrel, rain catchment
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